Dr Stéphane Bayen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry at McGill University. His research interests include (i) analytical chemistry applied to the detection of trace contaminants and their metabolites in food and the environment, (ii) the fate of contaminants (contaminant chemistry; bioaccumulation mechanisms involved in the contamination of foodstuff; behavior of contaminants during food storage, processing and cooking) and (iii) ecological & human health risk assessments. Since 2014, he is building a research program at McGill University (http://foodtox.lab.mcgill.ca/), concentrating on developing novel non-targeted approaches (e.g. Foodomics) to monitor contaminants and to provide a more in-depth understanding of their behavior from field to fork

Christoph Borchers, PhD, Director of the SCPC. Dr. Borchers is a Professor in the Gerald Bronfman Department of Oncology at the Lady Davis Institute at the Jewish general Hospital at McGill University, and holds the Segal McGill Chair in Molecular Oncology. He became a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2013 and the Life Sciences BC Award/Genome BC Award for Scientific Excellence in 2016. His research encompasses structural and quantitative proteomics as well as quantitative metabolomics, with a clear focus on clinical applications and translation. Dr. Borchers’ lab has developed targeted mass spectrometry assays for the ‘absolute’ quantitation of thousands of proteins from cells, tissues, and biofluids, including members of the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway and the PD-L1 signaling axis. He furthermore developed MS assays to determine mutation rates of known cancer drivers in tumor tissues on the protein level, and to determine the concentration of immune-therapeutics in patient blood, for therapeutic drug monitoring. The targeted MS assays developed in the Borchers lab are being used both for fundamental research and to complement existing genomic assays in precision oncology. Dr. Borchers has over 325 publications in mass-spectrometry based proteomics, with an H-index of 74 and more than 23,000 citations.

Dr. Brennan is a full professor in the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science, with a primary investigator role at both the UCD Institute of Food & Health and the Conway Institute. She leads a nutritional metabolomics group at the forefront of applying metabolomics in nutrition research and the development of personalized nutrition. Dr. Brennan was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for pioneering discovery work and is currently involved in two European consortia—Improve and Promed-cog. Her research has highlighted the link between metabolomic profiles and food intake, paving the way for the development of metabolomic-based biomarkers of food intake and strategies for personalized nutrition delivery.

Philip Britz-McKibbin received his PhD in analytical chemistry (2000) from the University of British Columbia under the supervision of David D. Y. Chen, followed by a Japan Society for Promotion of Sciencepost-doctoral research fellowship in the renowned group of Shigeru Terabe at Himeji Institute of Technology (2001-2003). Philip started his independent career in 2003 at McMaster University, and is currently a Cystic Fibrosis Canada Researcher and Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and an affiliate member of the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine. He is also an affiliate member of the Metabolomics Innovation Centre (TMIC) – Canada’s national laboratory for metabolomics research and innovative analytical services. His work has been funded by NSERC, CIHR, CFI, Genome Canada and Cystic Fibrosis Canada, and involves innovative collaborative research projects that have strong translational potential in clinical medicine and public health.

Dr. Michael Chen is a clinical pathologist, specializing in clinical chemistry and translational mass spectrometry. He obtained his undergraduate, medical, and MSc degrees at McGill University, Montreal. After his medical training, he completed the Clinician Investigator Program in clinical proteomics jointly developed by UVic Genome-BC Proteomics Centre and Montreal Jewish General Hospital, McGill University. He then returned to Victoria as a clinician scientist and the scientific director of the UBC Translational Omics Laboratory at Victoria General Hospital.

Dave is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Microbiology at the University of Victoria where he is also Director of the Genome BC Proteome Centre (https://www.proteincentre.com/). He is also a Mentor for the Chemical Biology group at the University of Gdansk’s International Centre for Cancer Vaccine Science (https://iccvs.ug.edu.pl/). Previously he was a Professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, MD (2013-2020). From 2012-2016 he was a Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) at the University of Turku in Turku, Finland. From 2013 to 2016 Dave was the Isaac E. Emerson Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and from 2013-2015 he was Director of the UMB School of Pharmacy MS Center. From 2004-2012 he was Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA where he was also Director of the School of Pharmacy mass spectrometry facility.

Dr. Harynuk is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Alberta. He received his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Waterloo in 2004, and then moved to Melbourne, Australia to continue the study of multidimensional separations. He joined the University of Alberta in 2007 where he has built a vibrant research group with interests in fundamentals and applications of multidimensional gas chromatography, in a variety of fields, including metabolomics, environmental analysis, and forensics, as well as chemometrics and the development of new tools for data processing. His laboratory is one of the nodes of The Metabolomics Innovation Centre (TMIC), where he has been a node lead and co-PI since 2013.

Dr. Tao Huan received his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Liang Li on developing chemical isotope labelling liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. After graduation, Dr. Huan did postdoctoral work with Dr. Gary Siuzdak at the Scripps Research (La Jolla, CA) to create metabolomics-guided systems biology for an in-depth understanding of disease mechanisms. In July 2018, he came back to Canada with the Assistant Professor position at the University of British Columbia.

Dr. Li obtained his BSc in Chemistry from Zhejiang University in 1983 and his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. He joined the University of Alberta in July 1989, where he is Professor of Chemistry and Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry. He is the Co-Director of the Metabolomics Innovation Centre (TMIC) of Canada. He is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Science). Dr. Li was Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Analytical Chemistry from 2005 to 2019. He served as Director, Alberta Cancer Board Proteomics Resource Laboratory, from 2000 to 2005. He was Chair of Analytical Chemistry Division at the University of Alberta from 2007 to 2019. He was a Co-PI of the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB) Project; his laboratory generated the HMDB MS/MS spectral library of the endogenous human metabolites which has been widely used by the metabolomics community. His laboratory is a pioneer in developing the high-performance chemical isotope labeling liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (HP-CIL LC-MS) platform for quantitative and comprehensive metabolome profiling of bio-systems. Dr. Li has received a number of national and international awards and honors. He has been an editor of Analytica Chimica Acta, an international journal on analytical chemistry, since 2005.

Dr. Thomas (Tom) Metz is a Laboratory Fellow and the Chief Science Officer of the Biological Sciences Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His research has focused primarily on developing and applying high throughput metabolomics and lipidomics methods, in conjunction with proteomics, in studies of chronic and infectious diseases, resulting in over 200 publications to date. More recently, his research interests lie in development of next generation multi-dimensional mass spectrometry measurements coupled with computational prediction of molecular signatures for reference-free compound identification. Previously, he led the Metabolomics Core for the NIH Common Fund Undiagnosed Diseases Network, the Proteomics Laboratory for The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young study, and the Pacific Northwest Advanced Compound Identification Core within the NIH Common Fund Metabolomics Program. From 2021-2023 he was President of the Metabolomics Association of North America. Currently, he is Lead of the PNNL m/q Initiative and Co-Lead of the ChemBio Analytical Sciences Hub of the Network of EXposomics in the United States (NEXUS) for Exposome Research Coordination.

Matej Orešič holds a PhD in biophysics from Cornell University (1999; Ithaca, NY, USA). He is professor of medicine (systems medicine) at Örebro University (Sweden) and professor of biochemistry (metabolomics) at the University of Turku (Finland). Prof. Orešič’s main research areas include exposomics and metabolomics applications in biomedical research and systems medicine. He is particularly interested in the identification of environmental exposures (exposome) and disease processes associated with different metabolic phenotypes and the underlying mechanisms linking these processes with the development of specific disorders or their co-morbidities. Prof. Orešič also initiated the popular MZmine open-source project, which led to the development and release of popular software for metabolomics data processing. As of 2016, he was made a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society. Professor Orešič currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Metabolomics Society and is one of the founders of the Nordic Metabolomics Society, previously serving as its chair of the board. Within the Metabolomics Society, he chairs the International Affiliates Task Group and is co- founder and secretary of the Lipidomics Task Group (LipidMet).

Lekha Sleno received her PhD in 2006 from Dalhousie University with Dietrich Volmer at NRC’s Institute for Marine Biosciences in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She then completed two post-doctoral stays, at the University of Geneva, with Gérald Hopfgartner, and the University of Toronto, with Andrew Emili, before starting her independent research career in the chemistry department at UQAM in 2008. She is currently a Full Professor and UQAM Bioanalytical Strategic Research Chair, where her research interests include developing novel LC-MS/MS based workflows for biomarker discovery and exposomics research. She is also co-director of the Centre for Excellence in Research of Orphan Diseases – Fondation Courtois (CERMO-FC).

Professor Ines Thiele is the principal investigator of the Molecular Systems Physiology group and the director of the Digital Metabolic Twin Centre at the University of Galway, Ireland. Her research aims to improve the understanding of how diet influences human health. Therefore, she uses a computational modelling approach, termed constraint-based modelling, which has gained increasing importance in systems biology. Her group builds comprehensive models of humans and human-associated microbes; then employs them together with experimental data to investigate how nutrition and genetic predisposition can affect one's health. In particular, she is interested in applying her computational modelling approach for better understanding of inherited and neurodegenerative diseases. Ines Thiele has been pioneering models and methods allowing large-scale computational modelling of the human gut microbiome and its metabolic effect on human metabolism. Ines Thiele earned her PhD in bioinformatics from the University of California, San Diego, in 2009. Ines Thiele was an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Iceland (2009 - 2013), and Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg (2013-2019). In 2013, Ines Thiele received the ATTRACT fellowship from the Fonds National de la Recherche (Luxembourg). In 2015, she was elected as EMBO Young Investigator. In 2017, she was awarded the prestigious ERC starting grant. In 2020, she received the NUI Galway President’s award in research excellence. In 2020 and 2024, Ines Thiele was named a highly cited researcher by Clarivate. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious ERC consolidator grant. She is an author of over 100 international scientific papers and reviewer for multiple journals and funding agencies.

Dajana Vuckovic received her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Waterloo, and completed postdoctoral training in quantitative proteomics at the University of Toronto. Her group at Concordia University specializes in developing new analytical methods and devices to improve metabolite coverage and data quality in metabolomics, with the overarching goal of discovering and validating personalized biomarkers in cardiovascular health and nutrition. She is a leading researcher in sample preparation for metabolomics, and has introduced in vivo solid-phase microextraction sampling for metabolomics and lipidomics including in vivo sampling of oxylipins in the brain to study neuroinflammation. Her lab has also built highly sensitive assays for mycotoxin biomonitoring, including the largest in-house library of human mycotoxin metabolites that includes 100 metabolites characterized for the first time. Her research has been recognized by the bestowing of the 2019 Young Investigator Award of the Canadian Society for Mass Spectrometry and the 2020 Young Investigator Award of the Eastern Analytical Symposium. Dajana is an active member of the community-driven international consortium mQACC (metabolomics QA & QC Consortium).

Dr. David Wishart (PhD Yale, 1991) is a Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He also holds adjunct appointments with the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and with the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. He has been with the University of Alberta since 1995. Dr. Wishart’s research interests are very wide ranging, covering metabolomics, analytical chemistry, drug chemistry, natural product chemistry, molecular biology, protein chemistry and neuroscience. He has developed a number of widely techniques based on NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, liquid chromatography and gas chromatography to characterize the structures of both small and large molecules. As part of this effort, Dr. Wishart has led the “Human Metabolome Project” (HMP), a multi-university, multi-investigator project that is cataloguing all the known chemicals in human tissues and biofluids. Using a variety of analytical chemistry techniques along with text mining and machine learning, Dr. Wishart and his colleagues have identified or found evidence for more than 250,000 metabolites in the human body. This information has been archived on a freely accessible web-resource called the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB). Dr. Wishart has also been using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help create other useful chemistry databases, such as DrugBank, FooDB and ContaminantDB and software tools (such as MetaboAnalyst, CFM-ID and BioTransformer) to help with the characterization and identification of metabolites, drugs, pesticides and natural products. Over the course of his career Dr. Wishart has published more than 500 research papers in high profile journals on a wide variety of subject areas. These papers have been cited >100,000 times.

Dr. Xia obtained his Medicine degree from Peking University Health Science Center (Beijing, China). His MSc (University of Alberta) thesis was on characterization of immune genes from expressed sequence tags. This project led him to discover his passion and strengths in combining big data, cloud computing, statistics, machine learning and visualization to understand biology and disease. His PhD thesis (University of Alberta) was on bioinformatics and statistics for metabolomics. His postdoctoral research (University of British Columbia) was on integrating next-generation sequencing data and biological networks for systems biology. Dr. Xia joined McGill as an Assistant Professor in 2015. His current research focuses on integrating big data analytics and high-throughput 'omics technologies to understand gene-environment interactions, with applications to metabolomics, microbiomics, and exposomics.